


introduction to genre in filmmaking

by thatsparrow



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:14:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25454488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsparrow/pseuds/thatsparrow
Summary: "This is the big shift in the movie, the pivotal moment when Diane goes from being another victim to the Final Girl. ThinkFriday the 13th, orHalloween, or evenAlien, for a less moralistic version that doesn't care so much about sex and drinking. You're Ripley deciding to set theNostromo's self-destruct sequence, absent the cute feline companion." Abed pauses, blinks a few times. "Should I have included a cat?"
Relationships: Annie Edison/Abed Nadir
Comments: 4
Kudos: 65
Collections: Battleship 2020, Battleship 2020 - Yellow Team





	introduction to genre in filmmaking

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ElasticElla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElasticElla/gifts).



Annie is covered in blood and running for her life.

Or, okay—it's not so much _covering_ her as it is artfully and meticulously applied, a homemade blend of corn syrup and food dye that's been splashed across her shirt and jeans, stained into the grooves between her fingers, dripping from a handful of faux stab wounds. She _is_ running for her life, though—or doing her best impression of it as Abed calls "Cut!" for the fifth time.

"I'm sorry, Abed," she says as the hired makeup artist freshens up the bloodstains (Annie's pretty sure it's just an undergrad from the theater department that Abed bribed with pizza—Jenny, maybe? Janet?) "I know I said that I'd help, but I'm not sure I'm any good at this."

"No, it's okay." He's looking at her in that careful, appraising Abed-way, like he's mentally sifting through puzzle pieces that nobody else can see. A little birdish, a little like he's looking through a microscope. "I just want to get this right. This is the big shift in the movie, the pivotal moment when Diane goes from being another victim to the Final Girl. Think _Friday the 13th_ , or _Halloween_ , or even _Alien_ , for a less moralistic version that doesn't care so much about sex and drinking. You're Ripley deciding to set the _Nostromo_ 's self-destruct sequence, absent the cute feline companion." Abed pauses, blinks a few times. "Should I have included a cat?"

"Abed, you know I don't watch a lot of horror, right? Portuguese version of _Gremlins_ aside."

"The Final Girl is the last person standing, as the name suggests, but it's more than that. They're the character who chooses to stop running and start fighting, who doesn't just survive by virtue of runtime, but actively outsmarts and outmaneuvers the villain. They can be a fighter, but it's not a necessity—it's more about resilience, grit. Not to overuse our reliance on the paintball mechanism, but it's not a bad frame of reference here. Nobody wins by playing like Starburns and hiding out until you hope everyone else has been shot—at a certain point, you have to pick up a gun." He considers her, head tilted a little. "That's why I wanted you for the part."

"Not just because I was the only one with weekends free?"

"That helped, too."

Annie smiles a little as Jenny-or-Janet finishes up, cheeks feeling a little warm from Abed's words. _Resilience, grit_. Granted, she's only seen bits and pieces of _Alien_ from one of Troy and Abed's movie nights, but it's enough to know that no one would mistake Ripley for a helpless damsel, some porcelain thing to be sheltered on a high shelf. Not like everyone treats her—little girl Annie in her skirts and matching cardigans, little Annie who needs protecting. _That's why I wanted you for the part_. It's maybe the nicest thing anyone has said to her.

"So—should we try again?"

"One second." Abed steps forward, staring at her carefully. He reaches out a hand and brushes a loose strand of hair back behind her ear, his fingertips warm against her temple. All at once, Annie is struck by his closeness, acutely aware that this would be the moment in the movie when she would lean in, would wrap a hand around his neck and pull his mouth down to hers— 

"Um, Abed?" Annie asks, her voice cracking a little as her cheeks flush eraser-pink. He looks at her curiously. "What are you doing?"

"Trying to decide how much of Diane's hair should be pulled back in this scene," he says. "On the one hand, she wouldn't want her hair in her face if she's running from a murderer, but she's also been through a lot at this point so some of it probably would have fallen loose, right? Jenny, what do you think?" He turns to chat with the theater major and Annie lets out a breath, looking anywhere but at Abed until the mental image fades and her heartbeat goes back to normal. Get over it, Annie. He was thinking more about the character than her, anyway.

After a moment, they decide to leave her hair as is and Abed shifts back to her, seemingly (hopefully) oblivious to what she'd been thinking. "Ready?"

" _Sha_ ," Annie says, maybe a little too quick, a little too casual. "Totally."

"Great. Remember, this is the lead-up to the pivot—it's when Diane tries to hide that we do the close-up on her face, when we see her realizing that she can't make it through the woods in the dark and decides to sneak back to the cabin to make a stand there. Obviously I don't expect you to convey all that with a series of facial expressions, but, you know, do your best."

Annie nods as Abed heads off to chat with the actor playing the murderer (another theater undergrad) and goes back to her starting position along with the cameraman. She's got a few moments before the scene starts, so she focuses on getting back into character as she waits, trying to be more 'Diane' than Annie. Takes a deep breath as she imagines Diane's heart-racing terror, the blood still sticky on her palms from where she'd tried to stem the flow from the knife wound in Carolyn's neck, the weight of finding herself alone and hunted as every sway of the branches sets her nerves on edge. She's Diane, and Diane doesn't want to die, wants so very badly to _live_ , but she's got no weapons and no ideas and the man behind her has already killed four of her friends and so when Abed calls "Action!" she barely needs the cue to take off through the trees, following the path marked out in red tape and trying not to twist an ankle as she goes.

"Don't be scared," a voice rings out behind her, so startling in her Diane-persona that she can feel her heart thudding faster against her ribs (not unlike the moment she thought she was getting a C- on their History paper and saw her valedictorian status slipping away—except not, because that's Annie, and right now she's Diane.) "Stop running, save us both the effort, and I promise I'll kill you quickly."

She reaches the end of the path as the voice starts to move in another direction through the trees, following her cue to duck behind the trunk of an evergreen, hands pressed over her mouth to quiet her too-loud breathing. The wind pulls at the strand of hair that Abed had tucked behind her ear and Annie closes her eyes, letting herself feel terrified and frustrated and furious the way she would be if she were actually being hunted like this, fear and rage sitting high in her throat.

And then she's not thinking of the Diane-persona anymore, but freshman-year Annie, hiding behind a recycling bin during the start of the first paintball game, neon-colored pellets ricocheting overhead while she'd tried to keep any of them from staining her sweater. She'd felt irritated, because _of course_ Dean Pelton would screw up something like this, and she'd felt annoyed at the thought of trying to scrub lime green paint from her cardigan, and she'd thought about foregoing the whole thing in favor of ducking-and-running to her car—but then she'd thought about what she could do with priority registration. She could ensure she'd have the best professors. She could schedule her classes to work reasonable hours that would keep her un-evicted from her shitty apartment. She could even double-major in Forensics and still graduate on time. Somebody had to win, so why couldn't it be her? Why couldn't she pick up a gun and pull the trigger like everyone else? Somebody had to win, and Annie hadn't really thought of herself as a fighter before, but she knew she wasn't a quitter, and so why couldn't she ace this like anything else?

"And—cut!" Abed says from somewhere to her left, startling Annie out of her reverie and bringing her back to the fact that she's still crouched down behind a tree, brow creased and fingers curved into white-knuckled fists as fake blood stains her nail beds. "That's good, that was really good. That was—perfect, actually. I initially figured we'd do the close-up on Diane's face as a separate shot, but I think it works much better as one take."

Annie stands up and brushes the dirt from her knees, sort of trying not to look at Abed while also trying to see enough of him to parse the expression on his face. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." He clears his throat, looks down at the screen on the camera. "Resilient, determined. Afraid, but not willing to let the fear beat her—classic Final Girl." He pauses. "Classic Annie, too." 

"Oh," Annie says, preening a little. "Thanks." She clears her throat, looks around and sees the cameraman which brings her back to the moment. "So, was there anything else we needed to do tonight, or—?"

"The next thing I wanted was Diane sneaking back to the cabin. For bloodstain-related continuity purposes, it'd probably be best to do it now, but we don't have to—"

"No, no, that sounds good. I'm getting in the horror groove, you know? Might as well take advantage of all this adrenaline while I've got it." 

Abed nods and leaves her there to go wrangle his villain into place for the next shot. She's still breathing a little heavy, heart still beating a little faster than usual, but she feels _good_. Feels confident the way she usually does when she's just checked out a stack of books from the library or finished sharpening the last of her number-two pencils. Maybe it's the costume, or the thin sliver of a moon overhead, but likelier that it's what Abed said to her, the validation of having someone see her how she wants to be seen, how she likes to think of herself—strong, determined. Resilient.

When Abed calls _action_ , she's ready. 

—

"Okay, here's what I'm worried about," Abed says to her two weeks later while they're halfway through _Aliens_ (per Annie's request, who mentioned that she'd been wanting to see what _Alien_ was about for a while, and per Abed's agreement, on the condition that they marathon the series.

"Except for _Alien_ _3_ , which completely upends the expectations established by the first two movies for the sake of shock value, and probably also studio executives who were feeling threatened by Ripley as a character.")

Annie waits for him to continue; knowing Abed, he's probably segueing off a flashback, and so this makes perfect sense to him. He'll fill her in eventually.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with the movie so far—commercial-ish elements aside—but what I'm really worried about is this—" he gestures between the two of them. "Us."

"You're worried about us?"

"As people, no. As characters in a romantic arc, yes." Annie goes very still. How could he know? She hasn't said anything, certainly hasn't _done_ anything—even if she's been thinking about it—and so how did he figure it out? She feels heat stealing up the back of her neck, becomes acutely aware of a popcorn kernel that's stuck to the roof of her mouth—but then her brain catches up with the rest of Abed's sentence. He'd said 'characters,' _plural_ , which means he's not just talking about her, but about himself, too. Her ears definitely turn pink. Abed continues.

"We've been hitting some of the story beats for a while now: spending an increased amount of time together, working closely in situations that often contain intimate undertones, thinking of each other in a new light—I don't want to make assumptions, so I'm mostly referring to myself with that last one, but I have seen you looking at me more than usual, and with the sort of expression you usually save for kitten videos and sales on your favorite cleaning products, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that it might apply to you, too."

"Okay," Annie says, a little hesitant, not really wanting to weigh in until she knows where he's going with this. "So, are you worried because you think that things will change between us? You know they don't have to. Whatever might be going on here—" she mirrors his hand motion between them, "—we don't necessarily have to act on it, or even do anything about it."

"It's not that—or maybe it is a little, but it's not _mostly_ that. Things changing is a normal part of relationships, I remember that from Troy and Britta, but that change is usually for the sake of something better, so it's okay. No, what I'm worried about is that I can't tell if this arc is happening for us, roommates and longtime friends Annie and Abed, or if it's happening for our alter egos, actor-Annie and director-Abed."

She frowns. "Abed, we don't have alter egos."

"We have different roles and a different dynamic, and that's close enough. Look, it's not uncommon for actors and directors to become romantically involved after working together—Linda Hamilton and James Cameron, Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rosselini, _and_ Isabella Rossellini and David Lynch—"

"Okay, okay," Annie says. "I get it."

"Point being, it's a situation that fosters romantic feelings, but the subsequent relationships are usually either short-lived or end in divorce, and I don't want that to happen for us if we did decide to lean into the romance arc—breaking up, I mean, not getting divorced."

"There's always a chance of breaking up when you get together, whether feelings develop on a film set or not. But this is different than those other examples, anyway. We've known each other for years, and it's not like I'm looking for some on-set fling."

"Known each other for years, but not necessarily been romantically interested in one another—one paint-covered Han Solo kiss aside." Abed looks back at the screen where a paused Sigourney Weaver waits. "I'm worried that whatever we're currently feeling for each other is only the result of the movie's environment and dynamic, and that once filming is done, we'll both change our minds about it. And then things will be awkward, even more so since we live together, and I don't want to learn what the Annie-Abed _we were on a break_ version of our storyline looks like."

She can picture it, too, more easily than she wants, stilted conversations and trying to dodge each other in the kitchen and lots of doors closing very quickly. Getting together only to realize they'd changed their minds would _suck_. "Yeah, I see what you're saying," Annie says. "So what happens between us now?"

"I think that we should ignore whatever this is until the movie is done, and maybe for a few weeks after. Then, if there's still romantic interest, we'll know that it's real and not just something between director-Abed and actor-Annie."

"You want us to turn off our emotions for like, six weeks?"

"Basically, yeah."

Annie goes quiet for a moment, thinks about saying: _I'm not sure it works like that_ , or _, what if I don't want to ignore this?_ or _, this isn't how I thought this conversation would go_. But this is Abed, and she knows Abed, and she gets Abed, mostly, and if what he needs is for them to put their feelings away until the movie is done and they're back to being regular-Annie and regular-Abed, then she can respect that. She had an unresolved crush on Jeff for basically years and handled that okay, right? She can handle six weeks.

She nods back at him and smiles. "Yeah, okay."

"Cool. Cool, cool, cool."

—

They have a party at the apartment to celebrate the screening when the movie's done (a real one by Britta's standards, with more than eight people.) Abed borrows a projector from the school and Annie builds out the seating area with pillows and couch cushions so the whole thing feels very movie-in-the-park, except in their living room. She's a little embarrassed at first when it starts, not used to seeing herself on camera like that, not used to everyone _else_ seeing her on camera like that, but after the initial discomfort wears off, she thinks she's done an alright job of it. Is she winning any Oscars? No, but she seems believably scared when she's supposed to be scared, and believably angry when she's supposed to be angry, and when they reach the pivot scene, the expression on her face surprises even her—all backbone and switchblade-steel. Grit. She catches Abed's eye and smiles a little. 

When the movie is done, all the cushions and pillows get put away for the afterparty, and when the _afterparty_ is done, it's just her and Abed again in the apartment, cleaning enough that they won't wake up to such a mess in the morning.

"I think it went well!" Annie says, bright, moving glasses to the sink and putting rubber-bands around half-empty bags of Chex Mix and Cheetos. "The movie and the party both, don't you?" Abed has been relatively quiet since the screening finished, and Annie can't tell if it's like his post-Jesus film catatonic quiet because he realized it was a piece of garbage or something else. She hadn't thought it was a piece of garbage, but she's also not Abed, and so can't see his work the same way that he does.

"I think it went well," he says, thoughtful. "But that doesn't really surprise me. I went in a pretty mainstream direction with this one, standard horror formula, reliable story beats, and when you check all those boxes, it's likely you'll get something decent as a result. B, B+ effort."

"But?" 

Abed frowns. "But now the movie's done, and we're not director-Abed and actor-Annie anymore, just regular Abed and Annie, and we've had fewer of the standard romantic tropes in our everyday interactions. I can't tell if that means that us getting together is a bad idea, or if we're maybe just not in the middle of a story right now, or if it's something else altogether."

It's not exactly what she wants to hear, but Annie does her best to hide the disappointment from her face. _Fewer of the standard romance tropes_ —how had he described them before? _Spending an increased amount of time together, working closely in situations that often contain intimate undertones, thinking of each other in a new light_. Annie looks at the space between them, practically the whole apartment, and she can sort of understand what he means; they're not exactly set up like they're about to lean in for a first kiss. But she also knows that this isn't a story, and so that means she can change it if she wants to. She puts away the last of the snacks and walks over to where he's cleaning up a mess of Solo cups in the living room.

"You know, I think we've made enough progress for tonight. Do you want to just hang out?" She takes the trash bag from his hand and sets it aside, then settles on the couch, waiting for Abed to join her. When he takes a seat on the other end, she shifts so she can prop her feet in his lap. "That was some party, right?"

"Okay, I see what you're doing."

"What?" She maybe pitches her voice a little too high with the question; okay, so her acting isn't _perfect_. "I'm just spending some time with my good friend Abed. And if, as we're talking about the night and the movie we just worked on together, we maybe realize that our feelings for each other have changed over the course of it, who's to say?" 

"I appreciate the set-up," Abed says, "though I do think that our history is so unusual that any conversations about our past will probably eclipse any of the standard romantic conversation elements." He pauses, considers, then rests a hand on her leg, just above the ankle. "But I suppose we could give it a shot." He turns toward her and says, in a voice that's very serious and very Abed, "I think I have feelings for you."

"I think I have feelings for you, too."

"At first I was worried that it was just a byproduct of working together on the movie, but now the movie's done, and I'm not your director anymore, and the feelings haven't gone away. Which is nice, but the whole roommates-slash-friends-turned-romantic-partners trend is even more common than chemistry between actors and directors, so does that mean this is more or less likely to happen, or just more predictable?"

"I don't know if it has to mean anything for us. Sure, there are plenty of people who have been roommates and then started dating, and some of them have broken up, and some of them have stayed together, but we're not any of those people. There's always a risk to starting a relationship, but I think it's a risk worth taking."

"Can I ask you something?" His palm is warm against her leg, his fingers drumming absently against her shin. Annie nods. "You said in the Dreamatorium that you were in love with being loved. Is that what this is? Are you interested in me because I spent most of the film shoot paying attention to you and giving you compliments? You liked Don Draper, and you liked Han Solo, but I'm not really either of them. Is that going to disappoint you?"

Annie pauses; this is an important conversation, and so she wants to be as careful with her words as possible. "I think that's how it started, maybe, but it also wasn't really about the attention so much as...noticing the things you noticed about me. I felt—seen, in a way that I don't usually, and that meant something." She reaches out a hand to rest on top of his, feels his fingers wrap around hers. Wow, her palm is really sweaty; she hopes he doesn't mind. "It's more than that, though—it's feeling comfortable around you, it's seeing the world how I don't usually, it's being pushed out of my comfort zone, sometimes, but in a good way. It's that you're one of my best friends, and one of my favorite people to spend time with, and that I've always known you were cute but I maybe didn't let myself focus on that too much because—well, a little because of Jeff, and a little because of Troy and Britta and not wanting to be one more couple in the group, but forget that. And it's not that any of those things weren't true before and suddenly they are now—they've always been true, but I think it took something like working on the movie together before I was really able to put it all together. And—yeah, okay, did I like it when you were doing Don Draper and Han Solo? Sure, but Don Draper also cheated on his wife and Han Solo starts off the series as a drug runner, and while they're fun to have adventures with, at the end of the day, the only person I want to spend time with is—you." 

She's a little afraid to look at his face and see how he's reacting, but she needs to know; besides, if the whole movie experience has taught her anything, it's that pretending to be brave is close enough to the real thing. She swallows and glances up to see Abed watching her, thoughtful, but in a good way—the same look he has when he's trying to decide which Hitchcock to watch or wondering if he should add more butter to his noodles. His fingers tighten a little around hers. 

"Okay," Abed says after a beat. "Okay." And then he leans forward and kisses her.

"Cool," Annie says when he pulls back, her lips tingling a little. "Cool, cool, cool."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] - introduction to genre in filmmaking (thatsparrow)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27273703) by [gingermaggiereads (gingermaggie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingermaggie/pseuds/gingermaggiereads)




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